US lottery ticket sales

The US comic book and graphic novel market and lottery ticket sales maintained a correlation of 0.97 between 2005 and 2022, which makes a certain intuitive sense: both involve colorful pictures, improbable outcomes, and the suspension of rational expectation. In both cases, the consumer is essentially purchasing a brief escape into a world where the rules are different and someone with an unusual costume might save the day. The key distinction, economists note, is that graphic novel readers have slightly better odds.

Both markets grew steadily through the 2010s and into the 2020s, with the comic and graphic novel market expanding partly on the back of the Marvel Cinematic Universe driving consumers to source material, and lottery sales rising as states expanded lottery programs and introduced new instant-game formats. US lottery sales grew from around $52 billion in 2005 to over $100 billion by 2022, while the comics market grew from roughly $500 million to over $1.2 billion in the same period. Both are discretionary entertainment purchases that proved resilient to economic downturns, as consumers tend to maintain small-ticket escapism spending even when cutting larger expenses.

Two forms of affordable escapism selling to overlapping demographics in an anxious decade will inevitably find themselves climbing the same chart. The data describes the appetite, not the menu.